Good Distractions, Bad Distractions

I’m halfway through the second sleeve of the High Verocity Jumper, but there’s not much point photographing it until it’s done, so here’s a picture of our flame tree:

Most of the flowers have fallen off now. It was a LOT brighter a few weeks ago, when I discovered it was flowering. The little bell-shaped flowers are amazingingly luminous:

And really cute:

How could I not have noticed it was flowering? Well, this house extention and renovation that we signed up for has slowed down almost to a stop. Late last year the builder asked for the second fixtures payment and he seemed in a big hurry to get it. Since an awful lot of the fixtures weren’t in yet (flooring, plumbing, tiling, etc.) we first asked the architect if we should pay. He said something like, ‘oh, what’s outlined in the contract isn’t all that practical. In reality, what we in the industry call ‘fixtures stage’ is quite different. Don’t worry – go ahead and pay the builder.”

So we did. Then six weeks passed with only about day’s work done. According to both the builder and architect, work wouldn’t be affected by any old fashioned Christmas/January shut down time, so that’s not the reason. They’d said be back the day after New Year.

During that time, if I looked outside at the mess and the half-completed extension, I’d just get depressed, so I stopped looking outside. It wasn’t easy, since there’s a huge pile of rubbish outside my office window. But something amusing and nice was happening to that pile of rubbish:

Nasturtiums started growing up over it. That made me smile, even if with some bitterness.

Now I’m getting hints that the suspicions I had when the builder was so anxious to get the last payment from us might be right: he’s got money problems. And since he’s now got most of our payment out of us, he has very little monetary incentive to come back and finish the job except for a paltry amount specified in the contract that he has to pay us each week the job goes over deadline.

It was supposed to be finished last October. Now I’ve abandoned all plans of going to New Zealand until next year, or offering friends a place to stay when they come down for a convention this June.

It’s all rather stressful, and the pressure just keeps compounding. I don’t tend to work well when this stressed – and since I work from home I’m surrounded by inescapable reminders of the house problem. The beau is recently retrenched, which should be fine because I’ve got a good contract. But I’ve started the project late because of the house, and I’m not writing fast enough or well because of the house, and if I don’t produce a book by the deadline… I won’t fulfill the contract and the publishers might eventually (they are usually very flexible and understanding… to a point) want their money back.

Right now life feels like it’s definitely on the sucky side, but that might just be because I’ve been a bit sick, am not sleeping well, and are really, really tired.

High Verocity

Finished the front and back yesterday…

And I have a bit of a sleeve done now, too. For some reason I have begun to associate this jumper with Top Gear. I always seem to be watching the show when knitting it. Fast cars, fast knitting. I suppose they go well together.

I completely forgot that it was Monday yesterday. I think the two hot days became the weekend in my mind. So I didn’t realise I’d missed my allergy shot appointment, and the first meeting of the contemporary art group I joined last year, until this morning. Doh.

Too Small, Too Big…

Our recent hosts in Adelaide sent me a photo of the cabled hat I made while staying with them:

Not sure what to call it. The Slightly Too Small Beanie? The Murray Ate Our Cars Hat? The Unexpected Holiday Beanie?

They reported that Holly, their cat, doesn’t appreciate the hat.

Maybe because it’s too big for her. I dunno. Can’t satisfy anyone. Maybe I should call it the Goldilocks Hat.

Hopefully eventually it’ll find a head that’s ‘just right’.

Manly Mega Muddlings

I’m a bit grumpy this morning. It has a lot to do with a) the cat’s new habit of throwing up if I don’t get out of bed when he judges it’s feeding time (today he discovered such a ploy ends with him outside and unfed for an hour), b) knowing the next two days are going to be stupidly hot, c) wishing that the very overdue house extension was finished.

In knitting news, I’ve been doing a bit of everything. I have one side of the Vero Jumper mostly done, and the other more than half done. It knits up so fast, I’m tempted to rename it to the Verocity Jumper. I stopped where the neck shaping for the front starts on the first side, and started the second, because I’m waiting to see which side turns out to have the most appealing mixture of strip colours – and the least likely to give the impression of lopsided boobs (lighter colours enhance shapes, dark ones flatten them out) before I decide which will be the front.

Last night I may have discovered a mistake in the Kimono Top that means frogging several hours work, but figured I better have another look at another time to be sure.

The first Manly Mega Sock is past the heel. I decided that to keep the colour graduation uninterrupted, I should do an afterthought heel. I could knit from the centre of the ball… or wait until I’d knit both tubes and find two sections of the colourway that matched in the leftovers so I got matching heels.

But to avoid short row heel fitting problems, I tried my new method of increasing just before the heel, and decreasing after it. Where the heel was to go I knit in a row of waste yarn.

At that point I realised that having increases and decreases either side of the heel row meant I couldn’t move the heel position if I got it wrong. I’d have to rip it all out. I went looking in my sock yarn stash for leftover yarn to do a test heel. And I found some patonyle in a colour that matched the purple/red/orange ply of the Mega Boots Stretch very well.

Remembering that Michelle had successfully used contrasting heels and toes on her MBS socks recently, I added the heel, put the sock on the beau (pre grafting) and considered if the yarn matched well enough. It looked rather good, actually.

Then, because I couldn’t face the grafting, I frogged the MBS yarn back to the heel and reknit the decrease rows. I figured it would take pretty close to the same amount of time to reknit as graft.

Of course, I’m not going to frog back and reknit the toe in the contrast yarn. But I will knit the cuff in it, I think.

Thanks and farewell to Marta

Thanks to everyone who commented and confirmed that UK and Aussie crochet terminology is the same. Now I’m wondering if the UK has a good crochet magazine. I have to admit, my brain did a little shriek and hid in a corner of my skull at Gillian’s comment about following Japanese patterns. I’d like to see one some day… just warn me first.

In local news (if you don’t know already) Marta of Marta’s yarns passed away recently. I don’t think I ever met her, but I know she made beautiful yarn and was famous for her amazing range of colours.

Unfortunately when I first started knitting I was too poor to buy Marta’s yarn. The first time I visited the shop in Malvern the woman running the place (not Marta) was so rude I decided to just leave. When the city store opened I had a closer look and decided the yarn was definitely worth the price, but I’d have to think of something really special to make. The second time I visited the Malvern store the assistant (a different one) was lovely, but the shop didn’t have what I wanted. (I wanted to make fine silk gloves in a glorious red, but they didn’t have any red silk that day.)

I did buy some undyed laceweight, which I later dyed to make the Scribble Knit shawl, but plain undyed laceweight was nowhere near as exciting as some of the yarns Marta made.

At the risk of sounding cheezy, she was a true artisan and I’m sure the yarn she made and the garments it was made into will be treasured by many, many people for years to come.

The Trouble With Crochet

While I was in Adelaide, messing about with my hostess’s yarn, I decided to make a simple granny square in one of the magazines I’d bought. Halfway through it began to look like a mutant, four-legged starfish, and a cog in my brain did a creaky, reluctant turn.

Oh yeah, I thought, crochet is different in other parts of the world.

Of course, it’s not the only fibre terminology difference. I reckon, though, that it’s the most confusing. The whole different names for different yarn weights is vaguely annoying, for instance. While it’s much easier to remember the 2ply/4ply/8ply/12ply system, it is rather silly calling the weights ‘ply’ when it has nothing to do with the actual ply of they yarn. Still, manufactuerers here do tend to get pretty close to the actual expected thickness for the ‘ply’, so as a standard it works very well.

The overseas method of naming the weights ‘fingering’, ‘double knitting’, ‘worsted’, etc., is harder to remember, and adding to that frustration is the fact that it’s an unreliable guide to the actual thickness of the yarn. I’ve knit yarn called ‘dk’ that was the thickness of fingering, for example, and another that was more like aran.

Since most os yarns aren’t available here, substituting is an essential skill for Aussie knitters. You eventually learn to guess at the required yarn thickness as much by the stated weight (if it does state one) as by noting the needle size, gauge, and the drape and stitch definition in the garment photo.

Fortunately, knitting stitches have pretty much the same names wherever you come from. Unfortunately this isn’t true for crochet. And to make it even more confusing, we use the same names for different stitches. A treble in Australia is a double crochet in the US. This results in mutant starfish granny squares, if you’re not careful.

Yesterday I found this old instruction leaflet from way back when I learned crochet as a child:

There’s even a stitch name correction in my mother’s handwriting, for a stitch name that Aussie patterns couldn’t even agree on at the time.

Curious, I decided to compare this leaflet to crochet instructions in a US and UK book from my collection. For the US I chose Debbie Stoller’s The Happy Hooker; for the UK I looked in my new Harmony Guide 300 Crochet Stitches book. The instructions in these books matched. That was interesting, because usually Aussies inherit UK customs. Had the UK taken on US terms, and if so what had Australia done?

The answer would be in local magazines, I guessed. Opening Yarn magazine, I discovered a lovely little table at the back of the issue explaining which Aussie stitches matched which North American ones. Looks like we’re sticking to our own terminology.

It then occured to me that maybe the Harmony Guide, while printed in the UK, may be aimed at the North American market, and that UK general usage may still be the same as Australian. I don’t have a UK magazine to check, however. (If anyone reading this post has, and cares to check, see if a double crochet involves winding the yarn around the hook first, or hooking straight into the chain.)

As for my granny square, I frogged it, checked the magazine’s instructions, then started again and it worked fine. I’m sure, once I get the differences memorised, I’ll be able to work US patterns without contantly checking instructions. But it’s not something I’ve ever had to do with knitting.